"Ted Hope kind enough to invite me to speak about new wave of production and @thecanyonsfilm at #a2e at the #sfiff."

Photo by @braxtonpope

Dogfish

"Our first booth!"

Photo by @michygoo

#A2E Instagram Galleryparticipant sourced

On Friday, we launched our A2E (Artist To Entrepreneur) program at the San Francisco Film Society with OnRamp (The Direct Distribution Lab). This is a pilot lab of a pilot program designed to give filmmakers the necessary entrepreneurial skills to achieve a sustainable creative life amidst this changing paradigm. We will be working out some bugs but hope to launch the second iteration as soon as possible.

As part of the lab, we have a first day of big ideas and case studies that hopefully will give the participants the foundation for a design for living and thriving on their art. As part of that I have prepared three brief lectures focused on what every filmmaker needs to recognize about the business, the culture, and their practice if they want to have a sustainable creative life. Split between the three categories, I came up with fifty things you should know. I will provide them to you over the next week or two, but I wish you all could have been there. It’s always different when you are in the room.

Below, I unleash what I think it is necessary to recognize about our industry if you are a filmmaker looking to survive from the work you generate.

WARNING: taking any of these points out of context, could create
unnecessary fear or depression. If you want to tackle reality, you need
to know what ground you walk on. Some truths are hard to accept but
once you do, you can move forward and to a different place. Adding Film
Biz realities to Culture truths, and building Best Filmmaker Practices
on those understandings could provide a Design For Sustainable
Collective Creation. Or at least that’s this Hope’s hope.

Filmmaking
is not currently a sustainable occupation for any but the very rare.
It is not enough to be very good at what you do if you want to survive
by doing what you love.

Presently
speaking, artists & their supporters are rarely the primary
financial beneficiaries of their work – if at all. Filmmakers are not
sufficiently rewarded for their quality creative output under current
practices.

The film
industry’s economic models are not based on today’s reality. They are
predicated on and remain structured upon antiquated principals of
scarcity of content, centralized control of that content, and the
ability to focus the majority of consumers towards that content.

Film
audience’s current consumption habits do not come close to matching the
film industry’s production output. America remains the top film
consumption market in the world, and is thought to be able to handle
only around 1% of the world annual supply – consuming somewhere between
500-600 titles of the annual output of approximate 50,000 feature
films. We make far more films than we currently know how to use or
consume. We drown our audiences in choices.

The film industry
has not found a way to match audiences with the content they will most
likely to respond to. It doesn’t even look like this is a priority for
the business. Everything is spaghetti against the wall, marketed in the
same way & only to the most general demographics of race, gender,
& income.

In order to
reach the people who might respond to a film, the film industry remains
dependent on telling everyone (including those who could care less)
about each new film. It is a poorly allocated dedication of resources.
We spend more money telling those who will never be interested, than
focusing on those who have already demonstrated support. There is no
audience aggregation platform exclusively for those who love movies, no
place where all people who love movies engage deeply about films – if
there was, marketing costs could shrink.

Digital
distribution is an emerging market and will continue to evolve over the
next decade. The value for titles for the long term has not been
specified for digital distribution; currently only short term value is
derived – and as a result films are licensed without full understanding
of future worth. We are doing a business of ignorance.

Predictive
value of films is primarily currently determined by an incredibly
imprecise method:“star value”, a concept that grows less predictive by
the day. Ask anyone and they will tell you that people do not go to
movies anymore to see specific stars but interesting subjects. Granted,
that is not a scientific method, but we know it to be true.

The
“fair market value” of a feature film’s distribution rights in the US
that multiple buyers want has dropped astronomically: from 50% of
negative costs 25 years ago, to 30% 15 years ago, to 25% 10 years ago,
to 10% today.

International territorial licensing of American
independent feature films has dropped by approximately 60% over the last
decade. Major territories no longer buy product. Most have given up
on “American Indies”.

Everything that has ever been made, has
also been copied. The logic of a business based on exclusive ownership
or limited access to something can not sustain. In the digital era the
duplication of data is inevitable. The unauthorized copy will never go
away. People can choose to try to avoid unauthorized versions but they
will be made or shared. This does not have to always be a bad thing
either.

Competing options for film viewing have diminished the
comparative value of theatrical exhibition. A consumer can not justify
the cost of a movie ticket when that ticket costs more than the cost of a
month of unlimited streaming. Home theaters’ quality surpasses many
theaters, and the seats are always better. Soon 4K Televisions will be
the norm while movie theaters are stuck in 2K.

The film business
lacks a long range economic model for exhibition. What is the business
of movie going? Exhibition gathers people together to sell them a 15
cent bag of popcorn for six dollars. We can profit from a large
group’s interest in more and more meaningful ways, but the
infrastructure is not yet designed to expolit this.

The film
industry foolishly rewards quantity over quality. Producers are
incentivized to forever take on more and the films’ quality suffers as a
result. The best work is not rewarded. Once upon a time, filmmakers
got overhead deals and that made some difference, but those days are
long gone.

Movies have a unique capacity to create empathy for
people and actions we don’t know or have not experienced. Science has
shown that the imagined releases a similar chemical response to the
actual experience. If this empathic experience is virtually unique to
film, can it be utilized more? I think so, tremendously so in fact.

Movies
create a shared emotional response amongst all those that view it
simultaneously. What other product can claim that? As a unique
attribute, how can you emphasize that more? Shouldn’t that be the
takeaway that your audience remembers and shares?

There has
never been a better time for most creative individuals to be both a
truly independent filmmaker and/or a collaborative creative person. The
barriers to entry are lower, the cost & labor time of creation
& distribution are lower than ever, and there are more opportunities
and methods that ever. We just need to abandon the old ways and
unearth the new ways.

What’s
your response to these? I personally think it would be great if the
answer could always be: “I am going to do something about that. And I
am going to get a little help from my friends.” Every single one of
these can change; it may require a complete move from doing things the
way we do them now, but they can get better. If you want to make
movies, and make your profession filmmaking, I think you will have a
tremendous advantage if you recognize the world we are living in and the
power you have to improve it. I think these points are the obvious
truths that we can use to drive us forward. And there are more.

Next
week I will share “19 Things About Our Current Culture That Should
Influence Your Creative & Entrepreneurial Practice”. Until then,
keep producing. We can build it better together.

SF Film Society Blog

✨✨"City of stars, are you shining just for me?" #LaLaLand starring #ryangosling and #emmastone

#WarrenBeatty at the 45th SF International Film Festival. Excited to host this legend at the #CastroTheatre on Monday.

8:30 tonight! We close out #DocStories with #WernerHerzog. Already have Sunday plans? Reroute them to the Castro. Tickets at sffs.org.

Love this portrait of Barry Jenkins from our 2008 Festival. His new (amazing) film #Moonlight is in theaters this weekend. Watch it for your own good! Photo by Pat Mazzera.

Our conversation with Ezra Edelman at #DocStories explores the director's masterwork, O.J.: Made in America, and examines race, celebrity, media, and the justice system in the US.
Don't miss this intimate and important discussion, November 4 at the Vogue.

The final weekend of Modern Cinema features spooky, scary good films from #Criterion, #Janus, and Apichatpong Weerasethekul. Ends Sunday at #SFMOMA.

Happy birthday, #CarrieFisher! Thrilled to have your new film #BrightLights open Doc Stories November 3.

Modern Cinema week two starts Thursday @sfmoma! Experience the stunning films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul with the director in person.

Modern Cinema starts TONIGHT @sfmoma! Classics from @criterioncollection & @janus_films along with stunning films by Apichatpong Weerasethekul. Movies roll for the next three weekends. Tickets are selling fast!

With new films by Werner Herzog & Ava DuVernay, #DocStories features the best nonfiction work of the year. Lineup just announced at sffs.org.